Had the writer of the editorial been present to mark the effect upon its unnamed subject, he would have been gratified. Jeremy cursed fervently. He then summoned Andrew Galpin.
“Andy, I’m going into the army.”
“Ay-ah?”
“What do you think?”
“Going to sell the paper?”
“Might as well sell it as wreck it.”
“Ay-ah?”
“For God’s sake, Andy,” broke out his chief; “can’t you say anything but ‘Ay-ah’?”
“I’ve said my say once.”
“That was before we were surely down and out.”
“I haven’t changed my mind.”
“I’m sick of a losing fight.”
“Good thing there’s folks in the world that aren’t. The French, for instance.”
Jeremy cursed again, wildly and extravagantly. “You’re trying to make me out yellow!”
“Boss, your nerves aren’t all they ought to be. Why don’t you drop in on your doc?”
“I’m going right from here to Doc Summerfield’s.”
“Ay-ah? You are feeling shaky, eh?”
“No. I’m not. But I want to be sure that I’ll get through all right on the physical examination.”
“Ay-ah. I guess you’ll do—physically.” Andrew Galpin turned and left. His head was hanging. He looked like a man ashamed. Jeremy knew for whom he was ashamed. Again he cursed, and this time, himself. All the catchwords in the vocabulary of patriotism could not now exorcise that inner feeling of surrender, of desertion.
A figure emerged from a forgotten corner. It was Buddy Higman.
“I heard you,” said the boy in a lifeless voice. “Are you goin’ to quit?”
The final word flicked Jeremy on the raw. “I’m going to fight.”
“What’s goin’ to become of us?” said Buddy simply. Jeremy stared at him without consciously seeing the open, freckled face of the boy. What he saw was the letter of Marcia Ames in which she had committed Buddy to his care.
“Become of you, Buddy?” he said.
“Of us. The paper. It won’t be us anymore with you out of it.”
“No. It won’t be,” sighed Jeremy. “But I’ll arrange to have you kept on.”
The boy shook his head. “Nothin’ doin’. She wanted me to have a job with you.” Suddenly he brightened up. “Boss, could I have a half-day off tomorrow?”
“Take it all if you like. Looking for another place?”
The boy thanked him without replying. Jeremy went to Dr. Summerfield’s office where he was duly stripped, prodded, poked, flexed, and stethoscoped by that slim, dry, brief-spoken physician. When it was over the doctor leaned back in his chair and contemplated his caller. “Want to get into the army, eh?”
“Yes.”
“What for?”
“To fight, of course.”
“Isn’t there enough fight right here?”
“It isn’t the same.”
“Certainly it isn’t. No flags. No ta-rum-ta-ra. No khaki, brave soldier-boy, hero-stuff. Eh?”
“I notice you went, fast enough. And you’re going again, aren’t you?”
“Different matter. I don’t own a trouble-making newspaper. What are you going to do with it?”
“The Guardian? Sell it.”
“To whom?”
“A. M. Wymett.”
“He’s a figurehead. What’s behind him?”
“I don’t know.”
“Nor want to, I guess.”
“I don’t care.”
“‘I don’t care,’” mimicked the physician. “You talk like a spoiled kid. Are you going to act like one?”
“I want to get in it! I want to get in it!” cried Jeremy.
“Or out of it? Which?”
“Doc, if you weren’t an old friend—”
“You’d punch my nose. I know. You’ll do ’most anything to prove to yourself that you’ll fight ’most anything. Except the enemy that most needs your kind of fighting.”
“I’ve been doing nothing but fight,” said Jeremy wearily.
“And now you want to quit.”
“I’ve had about enough of that word, quit.”
“Somebody else been using it to you? Ugly little whippet of a word, ain’t it! Well, you’re not going to profit by it, at least not with any nice, little, heroic, ready-made excuse to comfort yourself with. That much I’ve just heard over the telephone.”
“Telephone?”
“This one.” He tapped his stethoscope. “Straight from Central. Were you in athletics in college?”
“Yes. Golf. Some football. Cross-country run.”
“That’s it; the distance run. Been under some nervous strain, lately, too?”
“Try to run The Guardian for a month and see!”
“Well, the college athletics began it, and overwork and worry have brought it out. Those endurance tests will get a boy’s heart—”
“Heart! Have I got heart-disease? What kind?”
“Never mind the big names. Nothing to worry over. You’ll live a hundred years for all of it. But it’s there all right.”
“I don’t believe it.”
“Try another physician, then, my spoiled child.”
“I beg your pardon, doc. Of course, I know it’s right if you say so. But it—it’s—”
“Rather a soaker, eh? Don’t let it worry you. You’re sound enough to go ahead and raise any amount of Hades here, so far as your heart goes. I won’t say so much for your nerves.”
“It isn’t that.”
“No. I know. It’s the being counted out.” He wrote a prescription, looked up from it to study the silent and downcast patient, then tore it up and flung the pieces in the air. “I’m not going to coddle you with minor dopes,” he declared vigorously. “Jem, I read The Record editorial this evening. How much did that have to do with your warlike ambitions?”
“It hurt,” confessed Jeremy.
“It was meant to. Know who wrote it?”
“Farley, I suppose.”
“And you call yourself a newspaperman! Farley’s got the malice, but not the sting.”
“Who did, then?”
“Wymett.”
“Wymett?”
“I’d spot his style across the continent even if I didn’t know he was here. Don’t you see the game?”
“No.”
“Wymett has come on at Embree’s call. Embree is behind his bid for The Guardian. He’d rather buy The Guardian than start his new paper. Quicker and cheaper. Farley’d rather have him buy The Guardian than start the new paper; only one competitor in the field instead of two. Wymett sees he has you going; but he isn’t certain. He borrows The Record’s columns to force your hand. And you want to run away and play soldier!”
“I’ve got to! I’ve got to!” cried Jeremy, beating the arms of his chair with violent hands. “And now you tell me I can’t.”
“Steady! I never said you couldn’t play soldier.”
“My heart—”
“You’re a border-land case.”
Jeremy’s face lighted with hope.
“You can get in all right. I’ve passed cases like yours. But let me tell you what it means. It means that you’ll never see active service. It means they’ll make use of your brains somewhere, in a perfectly honorable, perfectly safe office job where the only gunpowder you can ever smell is by getting to leeward of the sunset gun. Mind you; you’ll get all the credit. You’ll go marching away in uniform with Committees handing out flowers and tears and embossed resolutions, and everybody will regard you as a hero, except perhaps me—and yourself. You’ve got to reckon it out with yourself whether you’ll put on uniform and shirk or stay home and fight.”
Strangely enough, at this bald summons there stood forth in Jeremy’s working mind two incongruous figures, each summoning him to judgment; Marcia of the clear, instinctive courage, and Andrew Galpin. Were they ranged in opposition to each other? Or were they not, rathe
r, united in impelling him to the simple and difficult course? More strangely still, it was the thought of Andrew Galpin which predominated at the last; Galpin who, facing disaster and the ruin of his dearest projects with an alternative clear and easy and not dishonorable, had made his choice of the hard path and the forlorn hope, without so much as a quiver of indecision.
“I stick” he had said.
Jeremy lifted his head. He rose and held out a hand as steady as a rock in farewell, to Dr. Summerfield who bestowed a passing and self-gratulatory thought upon the stimulant effect of psychologic suggestion properly administered. The physician took the hand.
“Well,” he said. “Which?”
“I stick,” plagiarized Jeremy.
Andrew Galpin’s relief when the decision was reported to him was almost pathetic. “Boss, if you’d laid down on this I was about through with human nature,” was his comment. “And now, what’s to come?”
Jeremy’s lined face puckered into a cherubic smile. “The last trench, and a damned good fight in it,” he said softly.
35
Mr. Burton Higman mounted the stairs of The Guardian office, dressed in his best suit of clothes. A powerfully inferential mind might have derived from his proud and important bearing that he had matters of moment on his mind; might further have deduced that he had been on a railway journey, from the presence of a cinder in his ear. He wore the air and expression, sanctified, as it were, all but martyr-like, as of one who, if he had not already died for his country, was at least prepared to. For young Mr. Higman had been performing that miracle, forever dear to dreaming boyhood; he had been saving the world. Such, at all events, was his own glorious interpretation of his enterprise.
The clock, pointing an accusing digit at V, was the only sign of life in the inner den. Buddy went to Mr. Galpin’s office. Empty also. So there was none to apprise him of the Boss’s final determination. A group of printers, scrubbed and clean, clumped down the stairs, still discussing the exciting rumor that somebody had bought out Robson; for every press-room is a clearing-house of gossip, technical and other.
“Hey, Buddy,” one of them hailed. “Got a new job yet?”
“Good-bye the easy snap,” added another. “The old Guardian’s sold again.”
“Much you know about it,” retorted Buddy, stoutly and scornfully. But the statement struck a chill to his ardent soul. Could it be that he was too late? Surely the deal couldn’t have been fixed up overnight!
On Mr. Higman’s official desk was a heap of mail which, in size, would have done credit to a correspondence school. It was Mr. Higman’s present professional duty, interrupted by his brief leave of absence, to sift out the anonymous communications, with special reference to those of a spicy and murderous character, and deliver them to his chief. To Jeremy’s journalistic instinct, it had occurred as a sprightly idea to make up a special page for publication of these epistolary efforts. It would be interesting to his readers, and would serve further to enlighten them as to the extent and virulence of local German sentiment. Perhaps, too, it would check the flood. So Mr. Higman sorted and divided and contributed marginal marks, and finally delivered a large packet upon the editorial desk for the Boss’s professional consideration, when he should return that evening, which, his young aide felt sure he would do, even though it was Saturday. Few, indeed, were the evenings that did not see a light in the den, close up to midnight.
Doctors’ protests to the contrary, notwithstanding, Jeremy came back to the office that evening, after a hasty dinner. Overwork might be bad for that second-rate and shop-worn heart of his. Loafing on the job would be a thousand times worse. That was one thing which his temper positively refused to endure. As he ran through the pile of letters, terminating in such suggestive and enticing signatures as “Vengeance,” “Outraged justice,” “Member of the Firing Squad,” “Old Scores,” or (with appropriate and blood-curdling commitments) those old familiars, “X,” “Y,” and “Z,” he realized that the threats were getting on his nerves. He was becoming bored, with an unendurable, deadly boredom, at their repetition. Nor could he deny to himself that they were affecting his actions, though in minor respects. For a week he had gone a block out of his way at night, not to avoid but to pass a certain unlighted alley-mouth wherein, so “Well-Wisher” and “Warned-in-Time,” two (or perhaps one) depressing correspondents had informed him, in feminine handwriting, lurked his intended murderers. Silly though it was to pay any heed, he had to do it. He had to prove to himself the futility of any such intimidation. In vain had Andrew Galpin tried to prevail upon him to carry a revolver. It was the common-sense, reasonable, unromantic thing to do. Jeremy wouldn’t do it. He wouldn’t even have one in his desk. But there were times in the long solitary evenings at the office when the unexplained creaking of floor-boards, or that elfin gunnery carried on by invisible sharpshooters in the woodwork of old buildings during nights of changing temperatures, produced sudden effects upon his handwriting which the two-fingered typist, Mr. Burton Higman, subsequently found disconcerting.
On this Saturday evening, he had set aside nearly enough epistolary blood-curdlers for his make-up, and was deleting certain anatomical references unsuited to fireside consumption from a rather illiterate but highly expressive letter, when he became aware that a draft from below was driving some papers along the hallway outside. A high wind off the lakes was making clamor through the street, but it had no business inside The Guardian building, and couldn’t have got there unless someone had opened the front door. He listened for footsteps on the stairs. Nothing. He returned to his editing.
“Getting your throte cut some dark nigt is too Good for you,” his correspondent had written, and suggested, in unpolished terms, disagreeable and lethal substitutes of almost surgical technicality.
Jeremy was Bowdlerizing these, when he stopped and put down his pen. The floor-boards in the hallway were creaking intermittently but progressively. Through the noise of the wind he thought that he could catch fragments of a whispered colloquy. Then, quite plainly, there was a retreating tread, which, however, left something. What? An infernal machine? Infernal machines do not linger, striving and forcing themselves to the determining action; theirs is a simple and direct method. And Jeremy could feel, through the noisy darkness, the struggle of a will, agonizingly fighting for expression, through dread. Himself, he was not conscious of fear. But every nerve was tense. He sat looking at the door.
For what seemed an interminable time nothing happened. But the Something outside drew slowly, painfully nearer. The knob of his door moved, a thing suddenly inspired to life. Jeremy gathered himself. It turned. The door was drawn open swiftly. A blur came upon Jeremy’s vision. His heart bumped once in a thick, dull way, then swelled intolerably. He half rose, sat down again heavily. His eyes cleared and the clogged blood in his temples flowed again.
She stood framed against the stirring, whispering darkness beyond. Her breath came quick and light. She was white to the lips, and more lovely even than the dreams of her, cherished through all those aching years.
“Jem,” she said.
“Marcia!”
She made one eager step forward. A vagrant gust, ranging the darkness, caught the door and drove it savagely to, behind her. She threw a startled glance back. It was as if the impalpable fates had cut off the last chance of withdrawal.
“I have come back to you.” The sweet precision of her speech was the unforgotten same, blessedly unchanged in any intonation. But wonder held Jeremy speechless. He stood, his hands knuckling the desk, and devoured her with his eyes.
“Will you not speak to me?” she said, with a quick sorrowful little intake of the breath. “You frighten me. You look so strange. Have you been ill?”
At that he came forward and took her hand, and drew out a chair for her. “Not ill,” he heard himself say in a surprisingly commonplace voice. “Sit down.”
She shook her head gently. “I can look at you better, standing.”
Her
candid eyes swept over him. She saw a face thinner and more drawn than she had remembered it; bitten into by stern lines about the mouth; the eyes tired but more thoughtful, and just over the temple nearest her a fleck of gray in the dark sweep of his hair. Involuntarily she put forth a swift hand and touched it.
“Oh, Jem!” she whispered with quivering lips.
He seemed to brace himself against her light touch. “That?” he said. “Oh, that isn’t anything.”
“How came it there?”
“Honest toil, I hope,” he returned cheerfully.
Her inventory was completed with a smile. “You are quite as carefully turned out as ever,” she commented.
“Habit.”
“Oh, no! Not habit alone. Character. And you stand as straight and square as you used.”
A curious expression came into the weary eyes. “Straighter,” he said. “That’s your doing, Marcia.”
“How mine?”
“It’s rather complicated and long. I don’t know that you’d understand.”
“Make me understand.”
“Give me time. This has been—well, startling. I think I’m a little dazzled and—and dizzy.”
And, indeed, Marcia Ames, as she stood there beneath the hard, revealing light of the overhead arc, was a vision to dazzle any man, and, taken on an empty heart, to make him dizzy. The years had fulfilled her; had added splendor to her compelling beauty without withdrawing that almost fantastically delicate and elusive challenge of youth. She seated herself, and Jem took his accustomed position behind the editorial table.
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